Sprout

Overview

Sprout is Cargill’s enterprise design system—created to unify the company’s digital experiences across internal tools, customer-facing products, and public web properties. Launched as part of Cargill’s broader Product and Digital Transformation, Sprout provides shared components, patterns, guidance, and governance that enable teams to design and build consistent, accessible, and scalable experiences at enterprise scale.

As Design Director and leader of the UX Center of Excellence, I was responsible for establishing Sprout as a strategic platform, not just a UI library—aligning design, engineering, brand, and product around a shared foundation.

The Problem

Prior to Sprout, Cargill faced challenges common to large, distributed organizations:

• Fragmented user experiences across products and platforms

• Inconsistent application of brand and accessibility standards

• Redundant design and engineering effort across teams

• Slow delivery due to re-solving the same problems repeatedly

• No shared ownership model for experience quality at scale

Cargill needed a system that could support enterprise complexity, multiple product models (custom, SaaS, COTS), and a global user base—without slowing teams down.

My Role & Responsibilities

As the design system executive lead, I:

• Defined the vision, purpose, and success criteria for Sprout

• Positioned the design system as a business enabler, not a design artifact

• Built and led the central design system team within the UX CoE

• Partnered deeply with:

  • Product leadership

  • Engineering and platform teams

  • Brand and marketing

  • Accessibility and compliance stakeholders

• Established Sprout’s:

  • Governance model

  • Contribution pathways

  • Adoption and maturity framework

• Championed Sprout with executive leadership, tying it to:

  • Risk reduction

  • Speed to market

  • Cost efficiency

  • Experience consistency

Design & System Strategy

1. From Components to Capability

Sprout was intentionally framed as more than a component library.

It delivers:

• Foundational UI components

• Design tokens and theming

• Interaction patterns and usage guidance

• Accessibility-first standards

• Figma and engineering parity

This allowed teams to move faster with confidence, rather than reinventing solutions.

2. Supporting Multiple Product Models

Cargill operates across a diverse product ecosystem. Sprout was designed to scale across:

• Custom-built internal tools

• Customer-facing digital products

• SaaS and COTS platforms

• Marketing and brand experiences

The system balanced flexibility with guardrails, enabling reuse without stifling product needs.

3. Governance Without Bottlenecks

A key part of my role was defining how Sprout would scale sustainably.

This included:

• Clear ownership and decision rights

• Contribution models for product teams

• Versioning and change management

• Maturity levels to guide adoption over time

Governance was designed to enable teams, not block them.

4. Design System as Organizational Leverage

Sprout became a mechanism for:

• Improving UX consistency across products

• Raising accessibility as a default, not an afterthought

• Coaching teams on better design and product practices

• Creating a shared design language across disciplines

This helped elevate UX from execution to strategic influence.

Outcomes & Impact

• Launched Cargill’s first enterprise design system

• Improved consistency across internal and external digital experiences

• Reduced redundant design and development effort

• Accelerated delivery by standardizing patterns and components

• Established a scalable foundation for future product growth

While specific metrics are internal, Sprout is now a core pillar of how Cargill designs and builds digital products.

What This Demonstrates

• Executive-level ownership of a design system

• Deep experience scaling UX in a complex enterprise

• Strong cross-functional leadership (Design, Product, Engineering, Brand)

• Governance, operating models, and maturity frameworks

• Ability to connect design systems to business outcomes

Why It Matters

Sprout represents a shift from isolated UX efforts to a center-led, scalable experience capability.

It shows how design systems, when led strategically, can:

• Reduce risk

• Increase speed

• Improve quality

• Align large organizations around user-centered thinking